Taking the topic back to the Switch, as I've said in a few threads, as mobile hardware continues to catch up we'll see more devices like this. In the medium to long term I think we will see a future Playstation or XBox that's more like the Switch than the PS4/XBOne. Once we've hit 4K @ 60fps where do we go from there? Sure you can always push the hardware further but even that list of games is shrinking. So these consoles will start to get cheaper, smaller and less power hungry... and eventually go portable.

I think Sony and Microsoft equivalents, especially with their lofty AAA releases, would be even more anti-consumer than some of the most poorly handled Switch releases (I'm talking Resident Evil: Revelations, L.A Noire, NBA, WWE, DOOM etc.).

The average consumer would barely be able to fit more than a couple of games and a few patches on a 128GB microSD card judging by how poorly developers for those platforms generally handle optimisation and compression. At least on the Switch, Nintendo themselves (if nobody else) are generally good at keep file sizes and patches (relative to other publishers) to a minimum, but at this point, Nintendo are merely the lesser of evils in that respect as they too have wholly embraced some of the scummiest practices to have become commonplace in the industry today.

@sillygostly
Medium to long term the storage situation, if anything, is changing more rapidly than the GPU horsepower situation is. Even using fairly conservative projections we're talking ~120GB cartridges being the new norm by the mid 2020s. And by norm I mean at a cost that today would get you an 8GB Switch cartridge.

It's the same deal with flash. The Switch launched with 32GB of internal storage, the 3DS launched with a 2GB SD card, the Wii launched with 512MB of flash. If that rate continues a Nintendo console that launches in 2025 will have ~200GB of internal storage. And if you're thinking "well that's pathetic" then maybe. But the same will be true for microSD cards. A 128GB equivalent microSD card in 2025 will be ~2TB.

So yeah, in the medium to long term these issues continue will fade away. Just as they have faded away enough to this point for the Switch to be possible. Eventually they'll be non-issues across the board.